Here is what I wrote in October 2010, when the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — Muhammad al-Badi — had just given a sermon calling for the overthrow of Egypt’s government (which happened four months later) and a jihad against the United States, a country he considered weak, foolish, and in retreat from the Middle East:

[Al-Badi's sermon is] one of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don’t fit their policies; and by experts, because they don’t mesh with their preconceptions.

Two and a half years ago, who would ever have thought that the United States would enter an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood? There were hints in President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, yet now it is clear that this is the new basis for regional security sought by the Obama administration.

For all practical purposes the closest allies to the United States are no longer Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a moderate Egypt, but an Islamist Egypt, an Islamist regime in Turkey, and the Syrian rebels led by the Brotherhood.

And literally every mainstream media outlet, every expert who speaks in public, every Democrat, and the majority of Republican politicians still don’t realize that this is true.

American history has witnessed the Truman Doctrine (help countries fight Communist takeover), the Nixon Doctrine (get local middle-sized powers to take part of the burden of the Cold War from the United States), the Carter Doctrine (defend Gulf Arab states from Iranian aggression), and the Reagan Doctrine (go on the offensive against Soviet expansionism).

Now, we have the Obama Doctrine: ally with the Muslim Brotherhood to transform the Middle East.

Is this an improvement on a strategy based on alliances with pro-Western dictators? We are still working with dictators, but now they are also anti-American and even more oppressive than their predecessors. The old dictators, as horrible as they were, were content with the status quo (except for Iraq, where the overthrow came without a new extremist regime taking power), whereas the Islamist dictators want the fundamental transformation of their societies. The old dictators were resigned to the regional situation; the Islamist ones want a wave of new revolutions, terrorism, wars against Israel.

And sooner or later they will strike out against America, just as they give their Salafist allies free rein to do so.

The occasion for declaring that an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups is the new Obama Doctrine is, of course, the decision to supply arms to the Syrian rebels. As recently as April 28 – a mere six weeks ago! — the New York Times was talking of an imminent rebel victory. Now, panic has set in regarding a total rebel collapse. This has prompted a rush to give weapons to the rebels even as they seem to have stopped the government advance without additional American weapons. In some parts of the country the rebels are the ones advancing.

The weapons will be given to the Supreme Military Council, which runs the Free Syrian Army (FSA). But while the FSA is nominally led by defected military officers, most of its soldiers hold views closely aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The fig leaf will be that these guns are being given to “moderates” — like the people Senator John McCain met with. The truth is that they will be given to people whose politics encompass hatred for Jews, Christians, and the West generally, and who are ready to engage in what, in American politics, has come to be known as homophobia and a War on Women.

If the rebels were to win, this would mean imposing a Muslim Brotherhood government on Syria. The Syrian political opposition organization the United States recognizes and has financially supported is overwhelmingly run by the Brotherhood, and it refuses to admit real moderates and Kurds on a serious level.

Note that this is the second Muslim Brotherhood entity the U.S. government has provided with weapons. The first was the Egyptian government, which — despite its questionable human rights record– the Obama administration has no objection to helping. The shipment of weapons was not even postponed as a gesture.

Egypt is an anti-American client state. And so is Tunisia. So, too, is Turkey, which is sort of a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Turkish style. (The Turkish regime, it should be remembered, is the chief adviser to the Obama administration on Syrian affairs, and its favorite government in the region.)

The entire ME problem would be completely different had Dear Leader not, in a monumentally stupid move, bolted out of Iraq over phony issues about the status of forces agreement. He thus lost a strategic base in a friendly country with a functioning national society. Instead, he chose an irrelevant exercise in the tribal waste land of Afghanistan.

The problem seems to be that Dear Leader favors the Sunni (and Saudi) side of the conflict against the Shia. Staying with a Shiite Iraq between Shiite Iran and Alawite Shia Assad would have provided an immensely influential position in the present area of conflict. Mere presence of the US in Iraq would frustrate Iran in subverting Iraq and establishing a bloc of dominance from Afghanistan through the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.

The likely prospect now is either that very Iranian hegemony, if Assad wins, or a strengthened Sunni Islamist base, if the rebels win (or both if Syria splinters). And because of his earlier blunders, Dear Leader has little control over the outcome. Given his record and the Kerry/Clinton clown act, I would expect the worst or horrors yet unimagined.

There is a certain symmetry in a Saudi-based foreign policy commitment and a Saudi-centered domestic energy policy. That has to be inadvertent, given the lack of skill on display here.

Yeah, Badi did that. And then 4 months later the Muslim Brotherhood publicly declared they would not participate in the Jan. 25, 2011 street protests that kicked the whole thing off. For all their supposed political shrewdness, it does not extend beyond winning elections, as Morsi is presently under siege in his own country worse than Mubarak was prior to the revolution.

As for Egypt being a client state, you may have noticed they have an American equipped army they can't use offensively. That means, for example, when it comes to the dam being built far to the South of them, Egypt is screwed, blued and tattooed.

It's an irony the Turks and Egypt are eye-balling Syria the same way they did at the end of the 11th C. because it has turned into the same no-man's land that brought on the First Crusade. And now the Crusaders will ally with the same Asia Minor with slightly different comrades and use it as a base to take Aleppo. In reality, Syria is in a civil war that will not end for a long time, even if Assad dies tomorrow. There's loot to be had.

If the MB were involved and openly admitted to it it would have hampered the revolution, and they knew, based on their past experience, if it had failed the regime would have cracked down on them mercilessly. An Islamic revolution a-la Iran wouldn't have gained the same support either in Egypt or, more importantly, the West who would have allowed Mubarak more freedom to suppress it rather than withdraw the American support for the regime. Making it a non-Islamist popular revolution, without the MB, allowed it to unify different segments of Egyptian society with different beliefs and worldviews and different political aspirations and goals, as well as gain massive support in the West with very little opposition. The MB openly joined in only later, when it was clear the revolution is almost certain to topple the regime and wouldn't cost them that many lives and that much repression they could expect in the case of failure.

We're told the MB had absolutely nothing to do with it, and just rode the wave later, but, for instance, what part did the mosques play in it? The media faithfully maintained the image of a "hitech" revolution, with a hitherto anonymous Google operative as its leading hero and the social media as its tool, entertaining the (false) assumption that Islamic revolutionaries are some kind of cave dwelling neandertals who wouldn't know their mouse from their keyboard if both hit them in the face, so it must be all liberal revolution. But even the reports in the media widely, albeit usually offhandedly, mentioned masses going to Tahrir Square after their Friday prayers at the mosques. Who were the imams preaching at the mosques and what did they say we'll never know because the media, 100% confident in their romantic version of Arab Spring of liberal youth (just like in America), united by their social media, going to the streets to replace the dictator with social democracy, didn't bother to find out.

Were there any MB operatives, agents in disguise or otherwise, who were agitating in the streets, mosques, work places and labor unions, educational institutions, social clubs, social media and other types of gatherings? Of course not! Just like there were never any communists in disguise using such methods with the aim of agitating, transforming the culture and society and finally bringing about a revolution using naive useful idiots to do their job for them. The MB were preparing for it for over 80 years. For over 80 years they have been usually suppressed and not allowed to operate in the open, but to infer from that that the MB might, just might, have developed some stealth methods would be insane, so there's no need to investigate such possibilities. Suffice is for the journalists to ask the few people in Tahrir Square who could speak English what is it all about and take them on their word. That is also how - by asking such people and colleagues - they got the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was weak and won't win the elections.

When there are mass demonstrations, as we've seen in Israel last year, it's not always as spontaneous as it seems. Protesting in the streets there were all kinds of individuals and organizations, and even many Israeli popular musicians who held free concerts for them (which REALLY drew out the masses), though I'm sure not all of them support a radical left regime for Israel. But when finally some journalists asked who supplied the tents for the tent camps they, those who paid for the tents, were all of a known certain political inclination. So were some of the hitherto anonymous leaders who suddenly emerged "from the people", judging by their lingo, even though none of them talked of a communist or socialist revolution.

The majority of the people attending the demonstrations in Israel were protesting real hardships of various types. It was anything but focused on one clearly defined strategic goal, which is why it could draw such a large mass of people with different worldviews. The question is, were there any agitators, except that Facebook page that started it all, who took advantage of the various problems to draw the people to the streets. First you draw large masses of people in the streets, protesting for whatever reason, then after they topple the government you take charge. Of course, that couldn't have succeeded in Israel because even if they had toppled the government, which they claimed isn't their aim, it would have only led to a new election where a centrist or center-right government, most likely headed again by Netanyahu, would be elected, or at best (from their perspective) a center-left government, since the far left hasn't a strong enough base in Israel to get more than a few seats in the Knesset. Things were very different for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt - they had the popular base, they've worked for decades to get it, and they only needed one free election to get to power. Where there any Muslim Brotherhood clandestine operatives involved? We can't know because no journalist had asked "who supplied the tents" so to speak.

So we are to believe that Badi declared they were going into the active revolutionary phase now, but no MB revolution followed, and instead, by sheer coincidence, there was a completely different kind of revolution shortly after that statement, that just happened to lead to the election of the MB, even though the MB had no part whatsoever in leading it, either from the front or from behind, to paraphrase some rather well-known American president. It's not like they could possibly have a sophisticated plan for a revolution they could start clandestinely as to garner massive support and avoid the repercussions in case of failure. It's not like in their 80 years of conspiring revolutions they had time enough to organize and come up with a plan like that and play the liberals and Westerners like a fiddle. No, Badi is just a cranky ol' man who just said it for the hack of it, without actually having any plan for an actual revolution, and then a revolution just spontaneously happened because Allah heard Badi from the heavens and made it happen by way of miracle.

I could believe that if our journalism was even remotely close to real investigative journalism instead of the combination of ignorance, laziness and ideological dogmatism pretending to be journalism that we have today. But as things stand we can only know very little and much of it is lies, and the rest is left to speculation.

You're trying to make a neat case for a revolution that surprised the protesters themselves. There is no neat answer. No one conspired to make it seem non-Islamist, no one has said it was only liberal youth, no one has said the MB was absolutely not involved. That's all straw man stuff you win cuz of the way you portray it.

No one knew what would happen, no one knew what the next day would bring. This was all unprecedented and there were no sophisticated plans or anyone being played like fiddles. What's a sophisticated plan worth if the army had opened fire? Did Syrians have a sophisticated plan? What would the sophisticated plans of Gandhi and MLK been worth in Nazi Germany?

An much of this did start as Facebook stuff. The earliest protesters, organizing around the police killing of Khaled Sayd were surprised at how many people showed up at pre-revolution protests and what they were allowed to get away with.

When people comment about the Egyptian revolution, they usually reveal more about themselves and what they want to believe than the revolution.

There are very few mosques in Cairo per se. People didn't stream out of mosques cuz there are none, relatively speaking. There are alleys and coffee places men put out green carpets, some with loudspeakers.

There were only 3 Fridays during the revolution. The first when protesters finally fought their way into Tahrir, the second, which was indeed crucial and the imans did sanction, and the last, the day Mubarak stepped down. Tent cities had no impact on the whole affair. This affair in Tahrir only lasted 18 days and then Mubarak was gone. He was gone because of mass protests that included everybody when there was little threat of imminent violence.

It was a close call at one point and could've gone either way. In the end, the army didn't fire on the protesters because there are no divisions within Egyptian society like in Syria. The whole thing was a perfect storm of weirdness no one can easily explain. If they could, there would be no dictators in the first place.

Morsi won a very close election, 51%. He wouldn't win today. Too many people have turned on him. What will happen now? As usual, no one knows.

The main myth, the Iran-On-the-Nile, the one-vote-one-time simply never happened and no one wants to admit they were totally wrong about that. And, it won't happen. Morsi is facing a recall and huge protests are called for June 30.

People are protesting all over the world and it's not religion but too many people with too much social media and too little money. People are going nuts in Brazil right now even though things have been much worse in the past. Why? I don't know. Is it the Muslim Brotherhood? Is it the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey? Was OWS Muslim Brotherhood?

Trust me, the MB in Egypt are sowing the seeds of their own political destruction by grasping at too much too soon while being gelded by outside forces saying, "Here's an army you can't use, here's a dam to suck your water and here's a train to bypass the Suez." Once Egyptians truly realize the MB is bringing ruin to Egypt with their constant bitching over nothing, they'll wake up.

"In an unguarded moment, Obama’s then-counterterrorism adviser let slip that he would engage Hamas if he thought he could get away with it. But this would be too big a step for even pro-Obama Democrats to accept. Besides, right now Hamas is in a conflict with Egypt, so that doesn’t have to be addressed by the U.S. yet."

These savages have been killing each other for centuries. We have had to take sides, mostly because we had no real domestic energy policy and we relied on Middle Eastern oil. With the advent of the development of our own natrual gas and shale oil reserves, we don't need their stinking oil anymore. I say keep then contained and let them go back to what they do best, slaughtering each other.

"In an unguarded moment, Obama’s then-counterterrorism adviser let slip that he would engage Hamas if he thought he could get away with it. But this would be too big a step for even pro-Obama Democrats to accept. Besides, right now Hamas is in a conflict with Egypt, so that doesn’t have to be addressed by the U.S. yet."Exactly - "yet". Obama allied himself with the MB at home FIRST, and this is where his policy comes from. These murdering b'tards are here in the U.S.A. and they have been for years; but under Obama they have allied and flourishing beyond their wildest dreams. Of course Obama doesn't want to rock the boat openly by allying with Hamas openly. Who in the hell do we think came up with the idea of sending money to Egypt? FBI and NASA doing outreach? MB operatives getting tours of our national security apparatus? Hakim Muhammed taking an oath of office using an effing Quran? No mosques were spied upon? C'mon ... this is ALL treason and there's NO other name for it!!!!!!!Middle East partners my hind end ... Obama is openly allying us with Muslim Terrorist tyrants and totalitarians that are hell bent on destroying our culture, our constitution and "flying the flag of Islam over the WH; not to mention changing the name of our country once they've accomplished their goals. WTF? Congress just CANNOT be THAT dumb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I've had enough Muslim Brotherhood influence in the WH - enough is enough ... Obama comes clean or he gets removed from office - his choice.

Typo alert: What word does the author mean instead of "south" in this sentence? I'm darned if I can deduce his intention but "south" makes no sense as it stands.

"The Brotherhood, which is the chief opposition group, wants to overthrow the king, but is afraid — precisely because the regime is so south — to try violence. Who knows what will happen, though, if Syria is ever taken over by the rebels?"